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Comment by payphonefiend | Hacker News Reader

so is this gonna stay in c++ or are you still moving to swift

Whatever happens, large parts of the codebase + dependencies will be C++ (or C) for the foreseeable future.

We're working on integrating with Swift, but despite the team's earnest efforts, Swift/C++ interop is still young and unstable.

On a personal note, I'm increasingly feeling like "C++ with a garbage collector" might actually be a reasonable tool for the task at hand. Watching the development of Fil-C in this space..

What'd be the effect of Swift be on the possibility of a Windows port? I know anything end user friendly is ages away, but I don't live in Apple land, and neither does most of the world. Apple has a monopoly on iOS and huge market share on Mac, and is still at 20% or something.

https://x.com/GregKamradt/status/1848045525473677314

https://x.com/wycats/status/973761496277704704

The core Swift Lang has is being made more independent of Apple, and can be compiled for an increasing number of platforms thanks to the LLVM-based compiler

You can even build swiftUI apps without opening Xcode at all nowadays (albeit no code signing)

which is great.

I never learned swift but I can add features easily now or create 1-day projects using swiftUI that makes great macOS native UI's.

I'm honestly not at all familiar with browsers but I really do wonder if a custom language wouldn't be a reasonable tradeoff. It's not all that insane as that is a path that has been walked before. For instance FoundationDB has their own syntax to manage their actor system which just transpiles to C++: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/main/flow/README....

V8 also has torque which I think to some degree also fits into that type of mindset.

> I'm honestly not at all familiar with browsers but I really do wonder if a custom language wouldn't be a reasonable tradeoff.

careful, last time someone said that we got Rust

Out of curiosity, why not C# at this point? It's pretty hard to marry C++ with a high-performant garbage collector, since underlying language semantics does not allow for e.g. compacting GCs.

What makes Swift a better choice than C#?

C# is more platform independent. Has a well-tested GC.

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